Idaho Society of Professional Land Surveyors
About ISPLS
Mission
History
The Idaho Society of Professional Land Surveyors
Land surveyors in Idaho were first organized as a subsidiary of Idaho Society of Professional Engineers. In 1974, the Land Surveyors of Idaho organized as separate entity.
The group incorporated In 1976 as a non-profit entity called the Idaho Association of Land Surveyors. The name was changed in 1993 to Idaho Society of Professional Land Surveyors.
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ISPLS
Land Surveying
Land surveying has a long and storied past. In relatively recent history, in 1803 Merriweather Lewis and William Clark were directed by United States President Thomas Jefferson (who was himself a surveyor) to investigate the Pacific Northwest in seach of the Northwest Passage:
“… The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.
Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, you will take observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkable points on the river, & especially at the mouths of rivers, at rapids, at islands & other places & objects distinguished by such natural marks & characters of a durable kind, as that they may with certainty be recognized hereafter. the courses of the river between these points of observation may be supplied by the compass, the log–line & by time, corrected by the observations themselves. the variations of the compass too, in different places, should be noticed.
… Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy, to be entered distinctly, & intelligibly for others as well as yourself, to comprehend all the elements necessary….”
– Excerpts from the diaries of Thomas Jefferson
